This meant climbing to the top of the 80 ft mast in a safety harness, with the yacht plunging in gusts of wind and a choppy sea, and holding on for dear life for five hours while she attached a spare halyard.

Cresting over the back of a wave, the boat plunges into a trough and rides up the back of another swell, crashing through into another trough.

It proved necessary to row ashore in a small dinghy, plunging through the hot spray past a Turkish battleship that had been moored for so long that the coral had grown up around it, immobilising it forever.